“Alexa, where can I get ice cream?” And pat, Alexa rolls out a list of great ice cream shops around you and even offers to send you the location to your email or cell phone. “Alexa, what is the weather like tomorrow and what should I be wearing?” And without any delay, you get to know whether it’s sunny, rainy or snowing but also instant suggestions of what best to wear and shopping recommendations forwarded to your Amazon shopping account in lightning speed!
Well, before you think this is an advertorial for Alexa, let me clarify it’s not! But, am sure most of you have had a first-hand experience with any of the virtual assistants out there like Siri, Cortana or Google assistant. And most of us are baffled by how we get served this information in an instant like we have conjured up a magic genie!
Hmm.. being an IT professional who has worked on several Artificial intelligence technology projects, it’s like being privy to what Alexa does under its hood and knowing its many secrets. One of the key things to make Alexa do the magic it does is ‘Training” and a lot of it at that! AI systems such as virtual assistants or chatbots are usually fed with a Q&A or an FAQ sort of a database with answers to the most asked questions. And the secret sauce to getting accurate responses is a ‘feedback loop’. And we are all too familiar with the super polite ‘Did that answer your question?’ or “Was your query answered?”. These are ways the digital assistants or chatbots validate if the query was resolved and if you were satisfied with the answer. A ‘Yes’ or a ‘No’ to this question provides validation to the AI system and sets off some more additional training in case the answer is ‘No’.
And this made me think, if we are constantly thinking of training Artificial Intelligence systems all the time to exhibit better behaviours and responses, we can most definitely apply it to ourselves. Am sure, you are thinking what’s new about that? We all have been exposed to some sort of professional training either on hard skills or soft skills at some point or the other. Yes, that’s true but are we doing it often enough and in real time? Are we being mindful of ourselves and keeping at it constantly much like the AI systems of today?
Let me explain with an example. Imagine a situation at work or at home where you felt you could have done better or done things differently. Are we mindful enough to take a couple of minutes to think of how we could have done it better and commit to that behaviour change right there? Most often we flit from one thing to another in our busy lives without this ‘feedback loop’. But once we do this feedback mechanism a few times, it sort of becomes an automatic reflex that enables us to become better versions of ourselves!
So, the next time you ask Siri “What is the best place from where I can see the Northern Lights?”, Siri has a well-researched answer because it has done the ‘feedback loop’ repeatedly and perfected its answer. There’s something to take a page out of right there! After all like the saying goes, ‘We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, it is a habit’.
